On influencing designs

Yesterday, I submitted a report for the SIMS project.
I thought that some of the reasoning in it could be interesting to
post here.

Our role (ie that of Human Work Science at Luleå University of
Technology) in the project is to support creating attractive
workplaces by deeply interacting with other work packages and
influencing their designs. We aim to analyse the technology that the
partners of the project develop well as the mining context and work
environments in which the technology will be used.

Ensuring attractive workplaces entails working with issues of health,
safety and ergonomics – from the “conception” of the technology to
its eventual implementation in organisations. Previous research [1] has shown that unlike issues relating to eg
technical performance, organisations do not take account of issues of
ergonomics in system design or company-strategy decisions. For the
mining industry Simpson and colleagues [2] phrased the problem as:

There is a … clear responsibility on the designers, manufacturers
and suppliers of mining equipment to ensure that the current
lamentably low level of consideration of both the operators and
maintainers of their products is significantly improved as quickly
as possible.

None of the [current problems] are subtle problems ... [and] no
detailed understanding of human psychology, physiology or anatomy is
needed to address what are essentially ergonomics limitations of the
crudest type. The fact that such fundamental limitations can and do
create serious health and safety risks shows clearly that
manufactures and suppliers are currently falling lamentable short of
their duty of care responsibilities.

To redress this situation requires much more attention to be given
to the consideration of human factors and ergonomics during their
design processes.

They also recommended that mining companies take more active positions
in communicating the importance of these issues; Horberry and
colleagues recommended an integrated and participatory approach (eg [3]). Such an approach involves the relevant
stakeholders, including operators and researchers, and considers both
operator and workplace requirements.

Our aim with our participation in SIMS is to support this integrated
and participatory approach, giving special focus to issues of
workplace attractiveness. Our activities aim to function in a
“facilitating” manner between operators, work system and
developers. On this ground our intention is to integrate into the
different projects of SIMS.

In planning the project, one of our base assumptions were that the
technology can be actively and directly influenced. This we are now
realising is not as simple as we originally expected. The heart of
the issue is that technologies are either in a too early or too
late stages of development to achieve any change in terms health,
safety or attractiveness. For example, the design of the
battery-powered mining vehicles are based on current generation
diesel-powered machines – changing these designs does not fall within
the scope of SIMS. Similarly but on the other end of the spectrum,
the project for semi-autonomous chargers concerns such an early stage
that issues focus is on concerns such as the design of the charging
head. In this sense the project has a narrow scope.

This results in three significant effects. First, we do not find it
fruitful to hope to influence current design of technology. Instead
our focus must be on influencing future designs. This however does
not constitute a problem. For example, the company in question already
sells battery-powered mining machines. These machines are the first
generation of such machines. We could consider the machines they trial
in the project a later generation. And the machines they will
eventually sell following the project, we could consider an even later
generation. Thus we can view the machines of SIMS as prototypes.
But any advice that we offer must focus on the generation following
the prototypes. For the semi-autonomous chargers, as another example,
this means that we must to give advice for the future product and not
just what gets developed in the project.

As for the second effect, we cannot base the investigations – and
subsequently the advice that these investigations result in – solely
on the technologies of the project. With the semi-autonomous chargers
it will not be possible to investigate a complete (physical) version
of the technology. Instead the focus must be on similar initiatives or
the plans for the technology. This implies that we should view the
technology of each project as “cases”. That is, the studies use the
technology in question to exemplify certain phenomena but tries to
generate advice for technology in a more general perspective. This
we hope also ensures that the results are relevant to a wider
audience.

The third effect of note is that we at this point do not find it
relevant to talk of concrete or specific suggestions. Such an ambition
assumes readily changeable designs, technology and so on. I would
argue that this builds on an approach close to action research, where
research activities actively seek to change the area under research.
As noted, while representative of the original ambitions, the nature
of the technology being developed hinders this approach. Instead, the
approach must be interactive. Here we would still investigate
questions that have significance for the different project partners.
And we investigate the questions in close cooperation with the
partners as well. The difference is that we do not seek to actively
influence the partners other than presenting our conclusions as we
reach these (recognising that this can influence future decisions of
the partners). (For more on these topics, particularly the difference
between an action-research approach and an interactive approach, see
eg [4].)

I do not have a natural conclusion to end with – I just wanted to
share some thoughts on this issue.